PARASUCHIA 185 



were generally known in scientific literature. Von Meyer thought 

 that he recognized in Belodon kapfii, the species most often 

 figured in textbooks, the same animal that Jaeger had previously 

 described. 



Von Meyer was not at all certain about the relationships of his 

 Belodon, though he recognized its affinity with the crocodiles. It 

 was Huxley who. in a famous paper on the evolution of the croco- 

 diles, published in 1875, united Belodon and another genus from the 

 Trias of Scotland, which he called Stagonole pis, with the Crocodilia 

 as representatives of the suborder Parasuchia, one of the three into 

 which he divided the order. Huxley admitted that the relation- 

 ships between the Parasuchia and the Mesosuchia or Eusuchia, the 

 other suborders which he proposed, were not as intimate as those 

 between the latter two, which were separated solely on the structure 

 of the palate and vertebrae, as has been explained in chap. xv. 

 As early as 1869 the late Professor Cope recognized certain forms 

 which had been previously described from Carolina as belonging 

 to the group, calling them Belodon, but it was not until 1896 that 

 E. Fraas separated Belodon planirostris of von Meyer as a member 

 of a distinct genus, to which he gave the name Mystriosuchus. 



Here, as a part of the order Crocodilia, the phytosaurs remained 

 till within very recent years, though there have been some mild 

 protests against the association, especially by Marsh, Zittel, and 

 Baur. The famous English paleontologist, Richard Owen, located 

 the "Belodontia," as the phytosaurs were often called, in his order 

 Thecodontia, based chiefly upon the manner of the insertion of 

 the teeth in sockets. But this has long since been shown to have 

 little value in the classification of reptiles. Various authors have 

 written about the phytosaurs in later years, notably Cope, Fraas, 

 Huene, and Jaekel, but it was J. H. McGregor who first definitely 

 separated the phytosaurs into a distinct order, in a careful revision 

 of the American forms. He called the order Parasuchia, after 

 Huxley, dividing into two suborders, the Phytosauria, after Jaeger, 

 and the Aetosauria, a group which, for lack of a better place, had 

 previously been classed with the Crocodilia, either as a member 

 of the Parasuchia or as an independent suborder by Zittel (the 

 Pseudosuchia). More recently Huene has shown that certain 



